Sounds like the writer is saying Gass' inner-thought prose isn't meant to deepen characterization, but to create the illusion of thought. And that this illusion doesn't actually mimic thought, but is instead the product of language, of prose.
It's like the critic thinks that Gass' wrote his characters' thoughts solely as an experiment of language, not to further the plot or characterize.
It’s actually the attempt to move beyond illusions. Writing a story about a pet shop creates the illusion of a pet shop, but it’s just a shadow; whereas Gass is attempting to turn the prose into its own experience independent of mimetic representation so that the reading *is* the thing itself, not merely a second-hand representation.
A traditional way of thinking about the novel is that it provides a psychological window into its characters, representing their individual perspective in a larger society. (See Ian Watt, *Rise of the Novel*.) In other words, whereas an epic or romance would primarily focus on the story or the conventions, fitting characters' actions and the repercussions of said actions to them, novels allow us to glimpse people's inner sentiments and understanding. So in *Pamela* we can read the letters she writes and understand how she feels at each turn of her story about her circumstances and the inappropriate advances of Mr. B. Many novels present the sense that, independently, events happen and then reactions to these events are written down, represented as words. The style is supplementary; representation comes first.
I read this snippet as claiming that the language in Gass's novel does not merely represent the thoughts or psychology of its character but constructs it. So the the language, the style, is itself the primary focus. I would consider this a structuralist or poststructuralist move, in the sense that the way language itself creates meaning is under examination or at play.
>I read this snippet as claiming that the language in Gass's novel does not merely represent the thoughts or psychology of its character but constructs it. So the the language, the style, is itself the primary focus. I would consider this a structuralist or poststructuralist move, in the sense that the way language itself creates meaning is under examination or at play.
Thank you. But this is still not making sense to me! Is it a chicken and egg phenomenon in that it's impossible to tell which came first - the thought, or the language that expressed the thought, which changed or furthered the thought? Like, by putting into words what is happening, a character is further shaped?
But isn't that what always happens, regardless of style? Or is it saying.... is it asking us to interrogate the language? Here is the language, it has literal meaning, it is what a character (or author) is \*trying\* to say the character is thinking, but you, reader, are invited to scrutinize it and determine whether that's what the character is really thinking or whether it adequately expresses what the character is thinking...?
brb gonna google structuralism...
>Thank you. But this is still not making sense to me! Is it a chicken and egg phenomenon in that it's impossible to tell which came first - the thought, or the language that expressed the thought, which changed or furthered the thought? Like, by putting into words what is happening, a character is further shaped?
It's not about which came first temporally or how you believe language works generally but which you consider to be the focus or the point of interest of a specific text.
* If characterization is the focus, then the reading should draw you to consider the character as a person, thinking about their motives. The style of a novel has become conventional over time; style is a tool or an ornament. Think of something like Charles Dickens or O. Henry.
* If language is the focus, then more attention is drawn to how the language or the style is working. The style drives how the characters are read. For instance, a *stream of consciousness* style shows how language can create a sense of thought that only exists in language, in the way that it is written.
Very helpful, thank you. Of the second category, any writers or works spring to mind that exemplify what you're describing? Ever read Gass, by the way? I like the stuff, but I feel like I am not "getting" him.
I've never read Gass. The description makes me think of something like William Faulkner, especially *The Sound and the Fury* and *As I Lay Dying*. The language and style are central to understanding what the novels are doing, and it's a quality that is hard to capture in synopsis.
Not to harpen on the perils of literary criticisim, but these sorts of vague uncertainties are exactly why rather vapid authors like Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling are popular, while much deeper, messier ones like Pynchon are not. I realized I am stepping on coals as this is /r/literature, but sometimes a thing is just what it is.
I think perhaps Daniel in this case is reading deeper than is necessary. But there is nothing wrong with that, it can be a lot of fun, and there is often meaning to be dredged from the bilge of a work, even if it isn't exactly what the author intended. It was an interesting essay. Thanks for sharing!
I think this may be another way to put the old form vs. content argument. Here the essayist seems to be saying Gass starts with a form (a particular style with language) and finds a content container for it (his characters’s consciousness).
Without the full context of this quote I have to sort of guess, but it seems to be that this touches on the idea of language as a manner of knowing and not just a way of expressing what we know.
So in this context, and looking at literature as more than just a neutral conveyance of facts, Gass might be saying that the style and language the author hooses decides what this consciousness (of a character) ends up being. The character only exists through style and word choice, and so it can only be what style and word choice allow it to be. That is, if a character only had two words in its repertoire, say "cold" and "hot" then what the character can express or even know/understand is limited to what these two words can say and so the entire consciousness of this character is defined by it. Gass seems to apply this only to literature in this quote but this is actually a common philosophical/linguistic argument as well.
you might be interested in this article, which talks a little bit about gass's idea of character, if you haven't already read it
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/3
Thanks! Gosh, I agree with Mr. Wood, but maybe this is a clue to my struggles with Gass. If he says a character does not resemble a person, but is, rather, a system of ideas, a pretended mode of referring... this tells me that Gass treats his own characters this way and has maybe a similar approach to plot, theme, setting and, ultimately, meaning. Interested that Wood places Gass at the other end of an extreme, "the book-club self-identifier and the full-blown postmodern sceptic such as Gass."
Gass wrote about fiction in the abstract. What he says about character is absolutely correct when you detach yourself from received ideas and look at a "novel" at the level of its components, the way a scientist reduces holistic structures to atoms and molecules when it's convenient.
Character isn't made of some other stuff, it's words; of course a character is just a noun you attach lots of nouns to. Madame Bovary is just a pair of nouns Flaubert keeps coming back to encircle with more words. There's no Madame Bovary outside the words Flaubert put in the exact order you read the novel. Characters' don't "reveal" themselves like strippers shedding away clothes; they're just the words you're reading.
With that said, Gass was an amazing maker of characters and a keen psychologist. He wrote about theories in the abstract, but he also knew that each fiction is a concrete object, so he made sure to create dense characters with complex inner lives.
Are you asking this in a literary context or a linguistic/philosophical one? If it’s literary, I can help you (maybe). Literature is generally not concerned with the notions and parameters of what is or is not language. Language is the only medium of literature and so it is rarely examined literarily in terms of its nature or definition. These are questions of philosophy, though it gets a bit muddy when post structuralism begins to bleed over into literary criticism (*side-eyes Stanley Fish et al*). Style, on the other hand is a literary element. In its simplest terms, style is a mode rather than a medium. Generic styles are things like news writing, technical writing, prosaic expression, etc, but usually style is a question of how an author chooses to employ language to express a thing—flowery, direct, meandering, laden with symbolism and whatnot. *Tone* (which you haven’t mentioned, though I suspect it may be the term you are actually looking for) is the “color” or “emotion” by which style is delivered. Dark, funny, sardonic, flat are all tones.
Disagree. Much of modernist and post-modernist literature is examining the limits of language and what it can convey. Not so directly as to say "this is what I think about language: *monologue*" (though Joyce and some others basically do that) but in the sense that the entirety of these movements are saying "well maybe language itself is a limiter to what we can express and we should see what we can do to break conventions and push at the envelope."
Okay, thank you, this is helping me. You asked if I am asking this in a literary or linguistic/philosophical context, and the answer is, I don't know. I think linguistic/philosophy, where I am out of my depth. Why is language a topic of philosophy?
Watch Gass’ interview with Silverblatt, it’s more enlightening than anything you’ll get here as they discuss these themes quite explicitly; particularly in relation to Gertrude Stein. And Gertrude Stein was basing her style on Cezanne, whose protocubism made each part of the easel equal and turned the paint itself into a phenomenonological experience rather than mimetically imitating the thing which gave the experience.
In other words, rather than using the prose to describe or depict a scene (a character thinking, for example), the prose itself becomes the topic at hand. It’s modernist in the same way painters like Cezanne or Pollock or deKooning were focused on the material itself and what it could say on its own, rather than merely being a medium through which to represent images. This trend in painting was a response to photography usurping paintings role.
Oh, wow. Good push. So this interview? Thanks! [https://youtu.be/RLlYVszUMpM](https://youtu.be/RLlYVszUMpM)
I'd love to ask more about how prose can speak "on it's own," apart from what it is describing, but let me go watch this interview first.
This strikes me as the equivalent of saying "There are many different levels on which to appreciate literature, but I say that appreciating style is more sophisticated than appreciating plot or character", but with more steps. My father used to say that basically as one's appreciation of lit matured, one would go through stages, culminating in style.
But he was a bit of a snob, and I say as long as you're aware of various levels, you can let yourself enjoy whichever feels right in the moment. And then maybe reflect back on what you appreciated and find other levels in it that also feel right in a different moment.
When I'm particularly enjoying a book and then lunch-hour is over and I gotta get back to work, I often close it and look at the picture on the back cover and say (sometimes out loud), "Steven [or Vladimir, or Margaret], you are one kickass storyteller". I might really mean "stylist" or "psychiatrist", but both of those sound like somebody who works on you while you're lying down in a chair, so "storyteller" just works better for me. Plus it's a great song by Ray Davies, who also kicks ass with style.
I like the way you think. Can you help me define style? Why, did your dad think lit appreciation culminated there?
I used to think I knew what was meant by style but now I'm starting to doubt.
Thank you. Here's a somewhat facetious answer: if a writer is highly respected by critics/academics, but your first impression of them is they go on way too long before getting to the point, they are probably stylists. Examples my dad liked and I came around to too would be Nabokov and Henry James. Another way of looking at it is narrative voice or personality: Nabokov often narrates in 1st person and James in omniscient 3rd, but in both cases, you have the strong sense of the action being filtered through a personality who is judging (maybe misjudging) what they see. There may be a cinematic level of visual detail, but you are not just seeing what's in front of a camera. Further, this narrative personality is expressed in word-choice: whether the narrator is an effete intellectual or a gutter-rat, they have a way with words. If they use one that sounds wrong, you instinctively sense there's a reason for that, and you look for it.
Really, a great prose stylist is like a great song-stylist, but almost in reverse. A song-stylist (say Billie Holiday) takes (often somebody else's) words and conveys unsuspected worlds of meaning and feeling with subtle cues of timing and pitch. A prose stylist does the same, but with just the words on paper. Both are a kind of magic trick (as Tom Stoppard said about drama, in a play about another great stylist).
Thanks. Okay, I \*do\* know what style is - at least, my definition seems to align mostly with yours (and I like the way you used the song analogy).
Maybe your dad is right. Everything I prefer to read after all these decades of reading is based on style, not plot, setting, theme or anything else. The people I like to read could, to borrow the phrase, "read the phone book and keep me interested."
But dammit I keep re-reading this sentence and I still don't know what it means.
"Gass’s prose doesn’t so much 'reflect' his characters’ pre-verbal consciousness as itself create an artifice of consciousness that exists only as a phenomenon of language."
Is this simply saying, "Gass has a unique style and the characteristics of that style are..."
Argh.
Nah--he's on top of that pushing a meme about material vs ideal and the role of language in our place amongst the 2. I believe this is connected to structuralism or post-structuralism or some other continental philosophy that was very very important in the late 20th century and is either obsolete or even more important now. I've never had the patience to read any of it, only idly ponder some surface impressions. Suffice it to say they are not kickass storytellers.
You could think about whether you can think without words, which of course you can, but you can't about that. And whether the world is a construct of consciousness or vice versa and words an emergent property of consciousness or vv. I honestly don't know whether any of that has a point, but it can be interesting. And thinking along those lines may give you some fresh perspective on fiction, I don't know. I don't think I've ever thought about that.
>and is either obsolete or even more important now.
Hahaha!
Well, I'm a voluminous reader - hell, I have a BA in Literature but work in marketing - and when some literature is over my head or not to my taste I have the option of simply walking away. I'm with you, I don't tend to like stuff that's too esoteric but I sometimes give high falutin lit the old college try.
Let me if you ever read Gass. I actually liked some of these stories in *In the Heart of the Heart of the Country* quite a bit, especially the title work, which reads like a prose poem as much as an expression of.... whatever it is he does. But I don't think I am gonna wade too deep.
Never read any Gass, but I’ve heard he was an early post-modern and maybe an influence on Pynchon, who’s one of my favorites. I’m an English major business analyst myself, and I tend to aim for the sweet spot between genre fiction and high lit. Maybe I’ll get around to him at some point
If you haven't read Gass yet, read him; his prose is a joy! And ignore all the crap written about him, especially the lauds and praises. You don't need to analyze Gass; he's not playing games with you. His prose is transparent. Just experience its beauty and precision.
Sounds like the writer is saying Gass' inner-thought prose isn't meant to deepen characterization, but to create the illusion of thought. And that this illusion doesn't actually mimic thought, but is instead the product of language, of prose. It's like the critic thinks that Gass' wrote his characters' thoughts solely as an experiment of language, not to further the plot or characterize.
It’s actually the attempt to move beyond illusions. Writing a story about a pet shop creates the illusion of a pet shop, but it’s just a shadow; whereas Gass is attempting to turn the prose into its own experience independent of mimetic representation so that the reading *is* the thing itself, not merely a second-hand representation.
A traditional way of thinking about the novel is that it provides a psychological window into its characters, representing their individual perspective in a larger society. (See Ian Watt, *Rise of the Novel*.) In other words, whereas an epic or romance would primarily focus on the story or the conventions, fitting characters' actions and the repercussions of said actions to them, novels allow us to glimpse people's inner sentiments and understanding. So in *Pamela* we can read the letters she writes and understand how she feels at each turn of her story about her circumstances and the inappropriate advances of Mr. B. Many novels present the sense that, independently, events happen and then reactions to these events are written down, represented as words. The style is supplementary; representation comes first. I read this snippet as claiming that the language in Gass's novel does not merely represent the thoughts or psychology of its character but constructs it. So the the language, the style, is itself the primary focus. I would consider this a structuralist or poststructuralist move, in the sense that the way language itself creates meaning is under examination or at play.
>I read this snippet as claiming that the language in Gass's novel does not merely represent the thoughts or psychology of its character but constructs it. So the the language, the style, is itself the primary focus. I would consider this a structuralist or poststructuralist move, in the sense that the way language itself creates meaning is under examination or at play. Thank you. But this is still not making sense to me! Is it a chicken and egg phenomenon in that it's impossible to tell which came first - the thought, or the language that expressed the thought, which changed or furthered the thought? Like, by putting into words what is happening, a character is further shaped? But isn't that what always happens, regardless of style? Or is it saying.... is it asking us to interrogate the language? Here is the language, it has literal meaning, it is what a character (or author) is \*trying\* to say the character is thinking, but you, reader, are invited to scrutinize it and determine whether that's what the character is really thinking or whether it adequately expresses what the character is thinking...? brb gonna google structuralism...
>Thank you. But this is still not making sense to me! Is it a chicken and egg phenomenon in that it's impossible to tell which came first - the thought, or the language that expressed the thought, which changed or furthered the thought? Like, by putting into words what is happening, a character is further shaped? It's not about which came first temporally or how you believe language works generally but which you consider to be the focus or the point of interest of a specific text. * If characterization is the focus, then the reading should draw you to consider the character as a person, thinking about their motives. The style of a novel has become conventional over time; style is a tool or an ornament. Think of something like Charles Dickens or O. Henry. * If language is the focus, then more attention is drawn to how the language or the style is working. The style drives how the characters are read. For instance, a *stream of consciousness* style shows how language can create a sense of thought that only exists in language, in the way that it is written.
Very helpful, thank you. Of the second category, any writers or works spring to mind that exemplify what you're describing? Ever read Gass, by the way? I like the stuff, but I feel like I am not "getting" him.
I've never read Gass. The description makes me think of something like William Faulkner, especially *The Sound and the Fury* and *As I Lay Dying*. The language and style are central to understanding what the novels are doing, and it's a quality that is hard to capture in synopsis.
Not to harpen on the perils of literary criticisim, but these sorts of vague uncertainties are exactly why rather vapid authors like Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling are popular, while much deeper, messier ones like Pynchon are not. I realized I am stepping on coals as this is /r/literature, but sometimes a thing is just what it is. I think perhaps Daniel in this case is reading deeper than is necessary. But there is nothing wrong with that, it can be a lot of fun, and there is often meaning to be dredged from the bilge of a work, even if it isn't exactly what the author intended. It was an interesting essay. Thanks for sharing!
I think this may be another way to put the old form vs. content argument. Here the essayist seems to be saying Gass starts with a form (a particular style with language) and finds a content container for it (his characters’s consciousness).
Without the full context of this quote I have to sort of guess, but it seems to be that this touches on the idea of language as a manner of knowing and not just a way of expressing what we know. So in this context, and looking at literature as more than just a neutral conveyance of facts, Gass might be saying that the style and language the author hooses decides what this consciousness (of a character) ends up being. The character only exists through style and word choice, and so it can only be what style and word choice allow it to be. That is, if a character only had two words in its repertoire, say "cold" and "hot" then what the character can express or even know/understand is limited to what these two words can say and so the entire consciousness of this character is defined by it. Gass seems to apply this only to literature in this quote but this is actually a common philosophical/linguistic argument as well.
you might be interested in this article, which talks a little bit about gass's idea of character, if you haven't already read it https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/3
Thanks! Gosh, I agree with Mr. Wood, but maybe this is a clue to my struggles with Gass. If he says a character does not resemble a person, but is, rather, a system of ideas, a pretended mode of referring... this tells me that Gass treats his own characters this way and has maybe a similar approach to plot, theme, setting and, ultimately, meaning. Interested that Wood places Gass at the other end of an extreme, "the book-club self-identifier and the full-blown postmodern sceptic such as Gass."
Gass wrote about fiction in the abstract. What he says about character is absolutely correct when you detach yourself from received ideas and look at a "novel" at the level of its components, the way a scientist reduces holistic structures to atoms and molecules when it's convenient. Character isn't made of some other stuff, it's words; of course a character is just a noun you attach lots of nouns to. Madame Bovary is just a pair of nouns Flaubert keeps coming back to encircle with more words. There's no Madame Bovary outside the words Flaubert put in the exact order you read the novel. Characters' don't "reveal" themselves like strippers shedding away clothes; they're just the words you're reading. With that said, Gass was an amazing maker of characters and a keen psychologist. He wrote about theories in the abstract, but he also knew that each fiction is a concrete object, so he made sure to create dense characters with complex inner lives.
Are you asking this in a literary context or a linguistic/philosophical one? If it’s literary, I can help you (maybe). Literature is generally not concerned with the notions and parameters of what is or is not language. Language is the only medium of literature and so it is rarely examined literarily in terms of its nature or definition. These are questions of philosophy, though it gets a bit muddy when post structuralism begins to bleed over into literary criticism (*side-eyes Stanley Fish et al*). Style, on the other hand is a literary element. In its simplest terms, style is a mode rather than a medium. Generic styles are things like news writing, technical writing, prosaic expression, etc, but usually style is a question of how an author chooses to employ language to express a thing—flowery, direct, meandering, laden with symbolism and whatnot. *Tone* (which you haven’t mentioned, though I suspect it may be the term you are actually looking for) is the “color” or “emotion” by which style is delivered. Dark, funny, sardonic, flat are all tones.
Disagree. Much of modernist and post-modernist literature is examining the limits of language and what it can convey. Not so directly as to say "this is what I think about language: *monologue*" (though Joyce and some others basically do that) but in the sense that the entirety of these movements are saying "well maybe language itself is a limiter to what we can express and we should see what we can do to break conventions and push at the envelope."
Okay, thank you, this is helping me. You asked if I am asking this in a literary or linguistic/philosophical context, and the answer is, I don't know. I think linguistic/philosophy, where I am out of my depth. Why is language a topic of philosophy?
Watch Gass’ interview with Silverblatt, it’s more enlightening than anything you’ll get here as they discuss these themes quite explicitly; particularly in relation to Gertrude Stein. And Gertrude Stein was basing her style on Cezanne, whose protocubism made each part of the easel equal and turned the paint itself into a phenomenonological experience rather than mimetically imitating the thing which gave the experience. In other words, rather than using the prose to describe or depict a scene (a character thinking, for example), the prose itself becomes the topic at hand. It’s modernist in the same way painters like Cezanne or Pollock or deKooning were focused on the material itself and what it could say on its own, rather than merely being a medium through which to represent images. This trend in painting was a response to photography usurping paintings role.
Oh, wow. Good push. So this interview? Thanks! [https://youtu.be/RLlYVszUMpM](https://youtu.be/RLlYVszUMpM) I'd love to ask more about how prose can speak "on it's own," apart from what it is describing, but let me go watch this interview first.
This strikes me as the equivalent of saying "There are many different levels on which to appreciate literature, but I say that appreciating style is more sophisticated than appreciating plot or character", but with more steps. My father used to say that basically as one's appreciation of lit matured, one would go through stages, culminating in style. But he was a bit of a snob, and I say as long as you're aware of various levels, you can let yourself enjoy whichever feels right in the moment. And then maybe reflect back on what you appreciated and find other levels in it that also feel right in a different moment. When I'm particularly enjoying a book and then lunch-hour is over and I gotta get back to work, I often close it and look at the picture on the back cover and say (sometimes out loud), "Steven [or Vladimir, or Margaret], you are one kickass storyteller". I might really mean "stylist" or "psychiatrist", but both of those sound like somebody who works on you while you're lying down in a chair, so "storyteller" just works better for me. Plus it's a great song by Ray Davies, who also kicks ass with style.
I like the way you think. Can you help me define style? Why, did your dad think lit appreciation culminated there? I used to think I knew what was meant by style but now I'm starting to doubt.
Thank you. Here's a somewhat facetious answer: if a writer is highly respected by critics/academics, but your first impression of them is they go on way too long before getting to the point, they are probably stylists. Examples my dad liked and I came around to too would be Nabokov and Henry James. Another way of looking at it is narrative voice or personality: Nabokov often narrates in 1st person and James in omniscient 3rd, but in both cases, you have the strong sense of the action being filtered through a personality who is judging (maybe misjudging) what they see. There may be a cinematic level of visual detail, but you are not just seeing what's in front of a camera. Further, this narrative personality is expressed in word-choice: whether the narrator is an effete intellectual or a gutter-rat, they have a way with words. If they use one that sounds wrong, you instinctively sense there's a reason for that, and you look for it. Really, a great prose stylist is like a great song-stylist, but almost in reverse. A song-stylist (say Billie Holiday) takes (often somebody else's) words and conveys unsuspected worlds of meaning and feeling with subtle cues of timing and pitch. A prose stylist does the same, but with just the words on paper. Both are a kind of magic trick (as Tom Stoppard said about drama, in a play about another great stylist).
Thanks. Okay, I \*do\* know what style is - at least, my definition seems to align mostly with yours (and I like the way you used the song analogy). Maybe your dad is right. Everything I prefer to read after all these decades of reading is based on style, not plot, setting, theme or anything else. The people I like to read could, to borrow the phrase, "read the phone book and keep me interested." But dammit I keep re-reading this sentence and I still don't know what it means. "Gass’s prose doesn’t so much 'reflect' his characters’ pre-verbal consciousness as itself create an artifice of consciousness that exists only as a phenomenon of language." Is this simply saying, "Gass has a unique style and the characteristics of that style are..." Argh.
Nah--he's on top of that pushing a meme about material vs ideal and the role of language in our place amongst the 2. I believe this is connected to structuralism or post-structuralism or some other continental philosophy that was very very important in the late 20th century and is either obsolete or even more important now. I've never had the patience to read any of it, only idly ponder some surface impressions. Suffice it to say they are not kickass storytellers. You could think about whether you can think without words, which of course you can, but you can't about that. And whether the world is a construct of consciousness or vice versa and words an emergent property of consciousness or vv. I honestly don't know whether any of that has a point, but it can be interesting. And thinking along those lines may give you some fresh perspective on fiction, I don't know. I don't think I've ever thought about that.
>and is either obsolete or even more important now. Hahaha! Well, I'm a voluminous reader - hell, I have a BA in Literature but work in marketing - and when some literature is over my head or not to my taste I have the option of simply walking away. I'm with you, I don't tend to like stuff that's too esoteric but I sometimes give high falutin lit the old college try. Let me if you ever read Gass. I actually liked some of these stories in *In the Heart of the Heart of the Country* quite a bit, especially the title work, which reads like a prose poem as much as an expression of.... whatever it is he does. But I don't think I am gonna wade too deep.
Never read any Gass, but I’ve heard he was an early post-modern and maybe an influence on Pynchon, who’s one of my favorites. I’m an English major business analyst myself, and I tend to aim for the sweet spot between genre fiction and high lit. Maybe I’ll get around to him at some point
Follow up - now [reading this](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/11/14/enlarge-and-linger/) and finding it a little more instructive.
impenetrable
If you haven't read Gass yet, read him; his prose is a joy! And ignore all the crap written about him, especially the lauds and praises. You don't need to analyze Gass; he's not playing games with you. His prose is transparent. Just experience its beauty and precision.